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Of the many people who experience major medical emergencies each year, a number of the victims do not receive the help they need because their emergencies are not obvious—to themselves or passersby.

EMS has designed a free, non-certifiable course especially for seniors* to help them recognize the signs of stroke, learn hands-only CPR, and learn what to say to 911 dispatchers when someone is experiencing a medical emergency.

Please consider taking the time to attend this class. You could be the difference in someone’s life.

* Notes: This class is intended for those 60 and older, but you will not be turned away if you attend. This is a FREE class. No preregistration required. Just show up and sign in when you arrive. If you cannot attend one of the classes offered in October, there will be others offered in locations around Seattle through winter and spring of 2018.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, September 27) is the PNA’s “Pig Out to Root Out Hunger”!

PNA Village staff will be at the 74th Street Alehouse (7401 Greenwood Ave N) for lunch at 11:15 AM tomorrow, and we’d love for Village members and volunteers to join us!

Please let us know if you’ll be there so we can save you a spot—you may call us at 206.789.1217 or email village@phinneycenter.org .

Hope to see you Wednesday!

What is Pig Out to Root Out Hunger? Pig Out is a neighborhood fundraising event for the PNA’s Hot Meal Program. Restaurants, pubs, and cafes in Phinney/Greenwood donate 15% of proceeds from September 27 to help fund three free meals every week—two dinners and a lunch—at the Greenwood Senior Center and St. John United Lutheran Church. The program serves over 16,000 meals a year to mostly low-income, disabled, and elderly neighborhood residents. Last year participating restaurants raised over $6,000 for the Hot Meal Program.

Breakfast, lunch, coffee break, happy hour, dinner and dessert! There’s a place for ’em all… you can pig out all day!

This is a favorite Village summer event, sponsored by our partner ERA Living. Please bring a friend and introduce them to the Village…this is a family friendly event and kids and grand kids are welcome!

Please consider bringing a dish to share, according to the first letter of your last name:

A – F: Salad or side dish

G – O: Salad or side Dish (you were originally assigned meat to grill but we’ve had a gracious donation from Safeway!)

P – Z: Dessert

If you would prefer, you may donate money that will be used to purchase food. $10 is suggested. ERA Living will provide coffee, lemonade, and ice cream.

We will also have a new member orientation before the potluck, at noon. If you are a new member, or if you are bringing a friend who might like to learn more, please consider attending!

Also, due to the smoke in our air over the last week, we have made arrangements with Ida Culver to have some tables and chairs inside. However, the forecast shows that she smoke should clear in a few days so hopefully it won’t be an issue.

Full Members, please let the Village know as soon as possible if you need a ride to the orientation and/or potluck. Call us at (206) 789-1217 or email village@phinneycenter.org

Your RSVP is appreciated but not required. We hope to see you on Sunday!

Did you know that medical errors in the hospital are the third leading cause of death in our country?¹ A successful hospital experience includes knowing what actions patients and their families should take.

Participants will learn about some of the opportunities and challenges that hospitals face and what patients and their families can do to help. Bring a notebook to write down specific tips and tools that you can use when you or a loved one is in the hospital.

This content was compiled by and presented with permission of CampaignZERO, a non-profit organization dedicated to zeroing out preventable medical errors. (For more information visit campaignzero.org. )

As I stepped outside my front door last week, anticipating a delicious macchiato at Herkimer Coffee on Phinney Ridge, I was unexpectedly confronted by a barricade. About five or six feet across, it stretched across the handrails in front of me, its multiple strands caught by the morning sun. At its center was a spider, only half as big as the head of a pencil eraser—the architect and engineer.

My wife, ever-admiring of the skill and determination of spiders, was close by and counseled me to leave the spider’s work intact and go out by the back door. I scoffed at her suggestion and crashed through the barrier, the tiny spider sinking to the ground as its net fell.

At Herkimer, I made a full report of this incident to Chad, one of the baristas that I’ve known the longest. He heard me unsympathetically and scoffed at my accomplishment: “Greatest Generation, indeed!” he said.

I scoffed . . . and crashed through the barrier, the tiny spider sinking to the ground as its net fell.

Kelly, the other barista on duty, heard my story and made a face. She related that as a young girl a spider had been trapped in her ear, and later had been bitten by a spider. Little sympathy there, either.

A harmless incident, not worth the telling? Perhaps. Yet as we encounter more and more spider webs these summer months, both my wife and I continue to be astounded by how these tiny arachnids accomplish such immense engineering marvels, the materials for which emerge from their own bodies. Think of their ambition! Even more, ponder their willingness to get up and try again after going down with their creations. Are these lessons worth pondering in our complex and confounding world?

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Do you have fond memories of playing board games with your family when you were a child, or as a parent? Or maybe you played word tile games with friends from school, or know folks who love playing games with number tiles or dominoes?

If any or all of the above apply to you, now is the time to check out the new PNA Village Game Group! No intense competition expected—just a fun time playing games together. We may have some of your old favorite games as well as ones that are new to you. You’re also welcome to bring your own favorite game!

Please join us on the 2nd Thursday of each month from 1:15 – 2:45 PM in the meeting room of the Broadview Branch of The Seattle Public Library.

Back to let them eat cake
to Oliver wants more
to orphans, hair shorn, lined up, plates out.
to the Dickensian streets
to children lining the tracks, picking up bits of coal,
swallowing down road kill rejected by dogs
—while Oliver slaves in the blacking factory
and Tiny Tim does die for lack of a doctor’s care.
Back to Scrooge, who never went away,
to child labor in the coal mines or coal factories
out of Blake’s dark satanic mills.
Back to typhoid and tuberculosis.
When all the owners care about is cost, people die.

Out of the mist, the fog and soot—
comes the pauper, the chimney sweep, the starveling—
with hungry eyes and dirty fingers,
pressed against the glass of the restaurant window
where you are eating your Christmas turkey.

Back to the return of charity,
of the sanctimonious charity of the wealthy—
like the dimes Henry Ford scattered to the crowd.
And who but Scrooge denies heat to the freezing,
aid to the famished and rest to the tired?

Back to that heartless century, in a soulless city.
To the workhouse with its iron gates,
To smokestacks against the sky
Back to those dank, back alleys where we have taken a journey
to a time and place that are becoming more familiar to us each day
for soon the brown air of London will be ours too.

· · ·

This poem is from a collection called “Foreclosure”, written about collateral damage caused by the Recession of 2008 and it unfortunately appears to be even more relevant today.

Also, if you would like to help out with our table we have 2 shifts available: 3:30 – 5:30 PM and 5:30 – 7:30 PM. (If you can’t commit to a whole shift, no problem…we’d love to have you there just part of the time.) This is an awesome chance to talk to people who might not know about our wonderful village.

We will be there on the 3rd Friday of every month, so if you’re not available tomorrow but would like to help on another day, please let Rebecca know: call 206.789.1217 or email rebeccaf@phinneycenter.org.

Ninth Annual Mother’s Day Vigil at the Northwest Detention Center

By Teresa Burciaga & Dick Gillett

Dick and Teresa’s original article was published in the newsletter of Seattle’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the PNA. Please feel free to comment and join the conversation.

On Saturday, May 13, more than 100 people gathered in Tacoma’s shabby industrial area, alongside the barbed wire-topped chain link fence surrounding a starkly nondescript prison: the Northwest Detention Center. After the crowd had laid down a mound of Mother’s Day bouquets near the fence, a Latino group played music and we prayed and chanted, hoping the prisoners inside would hear us and take heart. “No, No, No Basta Rezar,” the group sang, and we responded (No, it is not enough to pray).

We were gathered at the behest of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, the Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice, and the Washington Community Action Network. This was the 9th Annual Mother’s Day Vigil at the prison. The Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma is owned by the GEO Group, one of the largest security firms in the world—the same corporation that runs Guantanamo Bay. It is the nation’s second largest for-profit prison operator, with a capacity for more than 1500 persons at the Tacoma facility.

“They are mothers and fathers who have lived alongside us. They are our neighbors.”

Emboldened by new policies under the current administration, the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency has stepped up raids. These sweeps include men and women who have no criminal record— mothers and fathers who have held jobs for over 20 years; who have American-born children—that are being detained and deported. Civil rights don’t extend to these immigrants being held at the Northwest Detention Center. They can be held there indefinitely.

“They are mothers and fathers who have lived alongside us,” stated Teresa Burciaga. “They are our neighbors. Their children go to school alongside ours. They hold jobs, sometimes as many as three to make a living—and pay Social Security and Medicare tax. They shop at our supermarkets and stores and pay sales tax. They are good, law-abiding people. Now their lives are in jeopardy.”

There were testimonies at the Vigil. One young mother spoke of her hope for a better life for herself and her family. Another mother, a United Methodist lay woman, told us she was there to remember and pray for her son, two years after he was deported to Mexico. Many immigrants come to this country to escape chronic poverty, criminal violence and government corruption. The prayerful community gathered at the Vigil stood in solidarity for love, justice and compassion. As their signs proclaimed, “Love has no borders, ” and “No one is free when other people are oppressed.”

We have an opportunity now to stand up for them and create more sanctuary cities and states. And we’ve recently learned that St. Mark’s Cathedral is proceeding to become a sanctuary church. Meanwhile, we in the faith communities might work to eventually close down this private prison, the Northwest Detention Center.

With her megaphone voice
threatening war
if there is not peace,
shouting a president
into banning above
ground bomb tests,
a Medusa of the vocal cords
a Minerva of pacifism
a postmodern Cassandra
cobbled together from an immigrant stew
and a New York mouth,
she stands before Senator Jake Javits
surrounded by cohorts of Amazons
in her bright red
lacquered straw hat
the light shards reflecting off it
dazzled straight into the eyes
of her antagonist
so he, unable to return the lightning
of hers,
ducks his head to scrape gunk
off his shoes.Shame, she yells,Think of all the children you are killing.
Outside a policeman on horseback asks,Why don’t you women go home take care of your kids make dinner for the husband?

Once, lying on a bed at the Chelsea hotel,
I heard her voice over the strident traffic
shrieking, No More War!
loud enough for the pledge
to go echoing down 23rd St
cross the Hudson
and settle into the stones
of the Palisades
on the Jersey side.

· · ·

Bella Abzug (1920/1998) was a leading feminist and anti-war activist who helped organize Women Strike for Peace during the Vietnam War. Abzug became a U.S. Congressperson from New York in 1971. In the poem, when she confronts Senator Javits, I was there and was with her when we were trying to get Senator Robert Kennedy nominated for President of the United States and hoped, as well, to end the Vietnam War and thus bring the veterans home.